Spot On

Damien Hirst’s global show.

The art of Damien Hirst puts me in mind of a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner, from 1997. One of two vultures on a bare branch argues, “Sure, dead is important. But it has to taste good.” That finicky gourmand speaks to my sense of “The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011,” an archipelago of shows in all eleven spaces of Larry Gagosian’s empire of galleries, upon which the sun never sets: three in New York; two in London; and one each in Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills. (If you visit all of them before the shows close, you will be awarded a signed spot print. I’m not making this up.) Deliberate deadness distinguishes Hirst’s art, not only in the famous pickled shark but in everything he makes, including the three hundred and thirty-one paintings now globally on display: grid arrangements of colored disks, in household gloss paint, on white grounds, all but the earliest few of them executed by the artist’s employees. Their formulaic concept amounts to intellectual formaldehyde. But tastiness applies, too, in the pleasantly disorienting effects of colors that appear to be distributed at random: bright or muted or warm or cool, all ajumble. If there’s no harmony, there’s also no monotony. No two canvases are the same, Hirst says. They range in size from tiny to immense, and in number of spots from one to more than twenty-five thousand. I can enjoy looking at one for a while, but to like them would entail identifying with the artist’s cynicism, as herds of collectors, worldwide, evidently do. Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth. That’s not Old Master status, but it’s immortality of a sort.

Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965, and grew up in Leeds. His supposed father, a car salesman, left the family when Hirst was twelve. His mother, who informed him that his true sire was another man, has said that she tried in vain to control her son. He was arrested three times for shoplifting. But he persevered at school and, after an initial rejection, entered Jacob Kramer College, in Leeds. While there, he drew cadavers in the anatomy department of the University of Leeds; they made a lasting impression. He then spent two years as a construction worker in London. Having been turned down by Central Saint Martins, he was admitted, in 1986, to Goldsmiths, at the time an incubator of Conceptualist japery, and stayed for three years. In 1988, he organized a show of student and alumni work, entitled “Freeze,” in a disused London warehouse, initiating a cohort that would become the Young British Artists. The Y.B.A.s combined conceptual-art savvy with a will to bedazzle and provoke the widest possible audience. Their keynote was elegantly crafted effrontery. A definitive work in “Freeze,” by Mat Collishaw, presented, aglow on a light box, a photograph of an apparent bullet wound. Looking rather painterly, it split an aesthetic difference between “Yuck!” and “Wow!” When not milking death, Y.B.A. art savored sex and squalor, ideally in combination. A later work by Tracey Emin, “My Bed” (1998), incorporating rumpled and stained sheets and detritus including condoms and dirty underwear, is a touchstone of the movement second only to Hirst’s shark.

Hirst and his peers—the tricky but relatively dignified sculptor Rachel Whiteread and the painter Gary Hume, among them—were embraced by the mega-collector Charles Saatchi and promoted by the prestigious curators Nicholas Serota, of the Tate, and Norman Rosenthal, of the Royal Academy of Arts. Storms of public outrage were music to the artists’ ears, and the avidity of collectors, as the art market recovered from a steep recession in the early nineteen-nineties and commenced to soar, swelled their purses. Their vulgarity and their strength are identical: conceiving of contemporary art as a game and playing it to win. (In this regard, there’s mythic bite to Hirst’s career: the working-class lad who gulls the toffs and makes them like it.) They constituted a racy cultural export for Britain like nothing since the Sex Pistols. In 1999, a show at the Brooklyn Museum of works owned by Saatchi, “Sensation,” briefly roiled New York. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made headlines by denouncing Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary festooned with lumps of elephant dung. Hirst’s contribution included a huge glass enclosure, within which houseflies continually hatched from maggots and were exterminated by a zapper. The show so blatantly courted hatred that amusement was the only sane response. Its impact evanesced. In general, Y.B.A. art made scant headway on this side of the Atlantic, in the art world or in public notice. It was too transparently desperate—unlike the pricey frivolity, backed by real artistic command, of our own Jeff Koons. The pleasures of indignation tend to be spoiled, for Americans, by obvious intentions to incur it, given the native abundance of spontaneous occasions.

Certainly no self-regarding sophisticate around here will likely rise to the bait of Hirst’s spot paintings as David Hockney seemingly has. He is advertising an upcoming show of his own, at the Royal Academy, with a poster that reads, in part, “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally.” Oh, please. Andy Warhol would seem to have mooted the issue of authorial touch half a century ago, with his workshop-silk-screened Marilyns and other mass-cultural icons and phenomena. Since then, artists by the hundreds have cultivated the appearance of no-hands procedure, either by using mechanical means or, like Roy Lichtenstein or Photo-Realist painters, by feigning them. Color-chart paintings by Gerhard Richter—one phase in the great German’s philosophical and spectacular excavation of the medium—are often plausibly cited as precedents for Hirst’s spots.

Come to that, nothing that Hirst does lacks an art-historical pedigree. He has recycled tropes from Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism, Francis Bacon, Minimalism, and numerous near-contemporaries. His immersed animal corpses stem directly from Koons’s basketball-flotation tanks. Hirst is originally unoriginal, to put it positively: a master of supererogation. His work comprehends all manner of things about previous art except, crucially, why it was created. It smacks less of museums than of art-school textbooks. What may pass for meaning in the spot paintings is the sum of their associations in the history of abstraction. The more you know of that, the cleverer the paintings might make you feel. Buying one, you can hang it on your wall like a framed diploma from Smartypants U.

Duchamp remarked that art is created partly by its maker and partly by its audience. Hirst dumps pretty much the entire transaction into the audience’s lap. The result is art in the way that some exotic financial dealings are legal: by a whisker. Just as no law forbids the sale of bundled credit-default swaps on bundled subprime mortgages, no agreed-on aesthetic principle invalidates paintings that are churned out by proxy and then bid up at auction as fungible commodities. The “Why?” in such matters comes down to a historic, all-purpose, great “Why not?” A sense of frictionless impunity must be exciting if you’re on the supply side of the economy and the culture. If you aren’t, it feels wrong. The deadness of Hirst’s product lines—flipping the bird to anyone who naïvely craves more and better from art—upsets a lot of people. I deem their ire misdirected. Don’t shoot the messenger. Hirst honestly vivifies a situation in which the power of money celebrates itself by shedding all pretext of supporting illiquid values. When, in 2007, Hirst made a media event of fashioning and marketing a diamond-encrusted skull, “For the Love of God,” he as much as shouted the awful truth. (Whether or not the bibelot sold and, if so, fetched its asking price of fifty million pounds—some have doubted Hirst’s word on it—is an interesting but tangential question.) In the course of one fair and square taunt after another, Hirst surely marvels at what he is abetted in getting away with. “The Complete Spot Paintings,” to his credit, makes no bones about what a certain precinct of the world has come to. What it comes to next is somebody else’s move. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”